Enchanted Heart (37 page)

Caid watched his wife’s anguish build until he could take the anticipation no more. He pulled in a breath and covered her hands with his large one before he asked, “What’s wrong, Marty? What’s got you all worked up?”

She raised her eyes to him, eyes that swam with tears, while she mumbled, “I can’t go with you tomorrow.”

“Why not?” Caid asked with a wavering voice at seeing her in such misery. He scooted the wooden chair back and started to walk toward her to take her into his arms and to melt away her torment with his warm embrace.

Tears streamed down her face as Marty blubbered, “Because I’m having a baby!”

Stopping suddenly just before he reached for her, he began to laugh a hearty light-hearted laugh that caused Marty to follow suit while he pulled her to her feet and hugged her, rubbing her back in an effort to comfort her before he said excitedly, “That’s wonderful news! Why are you upset? Because you can’t go with me?”

She nodded, pulling away from him and sitting down again before she confessed, “Call me selfish but I wanted to go with you. And I wanted you to be with me during any of my pregnancies…”

“Pregnancies?” he asked while raising a brow. “You are planning more pregnancies even though you know…”

Then it hit him as to why she had to stay behind and he ran his hand through his black curls and suddenly lost all feeling in his legs. He kneeled at her feet and wrapped an arm around her shoulders when she began to cry harder. He offered, “I’ll put it off until the baby is born.”

“No!” Marty said adamantly as she boldly glared at him. “You’ll do no such thing! You promised my sister that you would go to get her daughter and I won’t let you change your mind.”

She rose to her feet and paced across the small kitchen floor while talking as if she had made up her mind and that nothing he could say would change it, “I’ll have Linda Blue Sky here to help me and Buck demands that I go right to bed. We’ll be fine.”

Caid covered the space between them in just a few short strides, taking her into his arms once again and declared, “I can’t leave you. Not in this condition. I’ll send Sunny and Hunter.”

She shook her head. Her eyes told him that she was firm in her resolve while she told him, “Seraphina doesn’t know them. Elsa doesn’t either and I doubt that she would let them take her.”

“We can write a letter and send it with them,” he offered with a shrug.

Again, Marty’s head moved from side to side before she argued, “If some strange Indian handed me a letter that was supposedly written by someone who refused to come in person to get a child that was in my care, I would never let her go.”

Caid drew in a long breath before he sighed and agreed, “I suppose you’re right. I wouldn’t either.”

Sunny and Hunter returned to the room at that point and Caid looked at them before he asked, of anyone who would answer, “So, are they here to help you with the chores?”

“No, they are going with you,” Marty said before they could answer.

He looked at the boys and then back to her and asked, “Why?”

She walked toward Sunny and touching his strong forearm, she said, “They are going to make sure you get there and back safely.”

“I don’t need them to protect me,” he scoffed with a wave of his hands.

“Not to protect you,” Marty corrected. “To accompany you. I just would feel better if they went with you. Please don’t deny me that.”

Seeing her beseeching expression, he relented with a shrug of his broad shoulders, “I’ll take them with me. But only for company.”

She reached up to entwine her fingers into his hair and drew him down toward her before she said, “Thank you. I love you.”

“I love you, Marty. Now, get yourself into bed!”

She giggled happily and turned to do his bidding while he hurried her along with a nudge to her lower back. As she crossed the threshold to their bedroom, she stopped and looked back at her husband, who had watched her leaving him. She smiled brightly, hoping that her effort to hide her returning feeling of trepidation was enough to fool him. Then, she squirmed out of her clothes, slipped into her nightgown and climbed into bed. Leaving the door open so that she would not be shut off from the family, Marty pulled the blankets to her chin and watched everything that happened outside her door.

She’d thought the subject was settled but upon coming to bed with her that night, Caid complained again about having to be escorted by those two, but then he began to relent after seeing his wife’s pitiful face as she pouted and pleaded with him to take them along without a fuss. His repeated remark to her that he didn’t mind having the boys along for companionship; he just did not feel that he needed them for protection. But, in his mind, he realized when he finally completely conceded was, if that is how she saw it, he’d let her believe it. He held her close to his body all night long, breathing in her scent and watching her sleep with peaceful dreams.

The next morning before he left her, he’d touched a palm to her still-flat belly and told the little one inside, “You hang on in there and make your mama happy.”

“I’m already happy, Caid,” she had said with tears streaming down her face, already overcome by the loneliness that his leaving her would cause.

“So am I,” he had whispered just before he’d bent to kiss her and then gently squeeze her in his arms. “But I’ll be happier when I come back and find you still in bed!”

Her smile assured him that she would do as she was told and she threw her body into his so that she could hold on to him for as long as possible. Then, he pulled away from her to amble across the porch. He looked back at her as she stood holding on to the screen door as if it would keep her from slipping to the floor in apprehension. For a fleeting moment, she thought she saw sadness in his dark blue eyes as if he too was dreading their time apart, but it passed as quickly as it had come. He stepped off the newly replaced and painted porch and onto the dirt walkway that Marty had lined with transplanted flowers. A wink and a wave and he eased himself into the saddle.

Eager for the adventure, the chestnut stallion sidestepped and bobbed its head before Caid took up the reins and nodded a good-bye. He whirled the stallion around and rode down the lane toward the mountains that would soon swallow him up, along with his companions, in the vast expanse. The horse that had come with the property followed the three horses that left it behind until they passed the end of its pasture. It kicked up its back legs and snorted a protest that it was not invited to join in the journey, then it ducked its head and spewed spittle onto the grass before it began to nibble contentedly.

Marty gave herself a one-armed hug on their front porch while she waved to her husband and the two Comanche braves who rode on either side of him and she watched them until they were out of her sight. Then she stood on her tip-toes to try to see him one last time before she gave up dejectedly and touched a hand to her abdomen, speaking softly to the baby inside, “You do as your papa says, little one. Hang on until he comes home!”

Chapter Thirty-Eight

“Come, Mrs. Marty,” she heard Linda Blue Sky call to her from inside the house. She used to call her Miss Marty until the day that she’d been married, but now, she was Mrs. Marty to the woman who had moved in with her yesterday. It seemed to Marty that, overnight, her debilitated state had made her sedate while her female Indian companion had become bolder and domineering.

“Back to bed. Mr. Caid told me to make you stay there. You don’t want him angry with Linda Blue Sky, do you?”

Linda clucked like a mother hen all the way back to the bedroom where she tucked Mrs. Marty in and shook her finger at her before she closed the door and left her to rest. Pausing just a moment, she waited until the vision that flashed through her mind, taking her to a place somewhere in the future and then disappeared, before she carried onward with a smile on her pudgy face.

These visions had become a normal part of Linda’s life. They came, they went, and they sometimes lingered in her mind. Sometimes, the visions came to fruition for the person for whom she had ‘seen’ the future. But other times, they danced around in her head like a song on the wind, a song that never had an end.

They were never about her. She could not see her own future. She did not know from one moment to the next what occurrence would shape the one that followed. But she was content just to be alive and whatever happened to her was just another step toward her final reward. She would continue stepping, over gaps in the land, under trees hanging down and blocking her path, and over mountains that towered above her. And if something happened that caused her to pause on her journey, she would wait until it was time to continue. If death did not permanently halt her progress, she was determined to walk onward until it marked her final step.

Concern for herself was not on her mind when Linda Blue Sky returned with a meal for Mrs. Marty and while she sat with her to make sure that she ate every last bite. What worried Linda was the affliction that plagued her charge and the woman’s sister. She had never heard of this ailment that Mr. Buck had explained to her as an illness that could end the woman’s life if the bleeding could not be stopped. She sat quietly, watching Mrs. Marty move the spoon from the bowl to her lips and wondered why her friend was punished for just being alive and for conceiving a child.

While she ate, Marty asked of her new friend, “How long have you been with Buck?”

The Comanche woman stared out the window while she formed the words to recall the memory of being rescued by the man in question, “Ten years. Maybe more,” she said with a shake of her head. Then she raised her shoulders and said, “He found Linda Blue Sky living in squalor in a mud hut that I had pasted together with straw and sticks. My husband was killed in a battle with the Apaches and I had no one to take care of me. All I owned were the clothes that I wore and a few things that I had not sold.”

Marty watched Linda with growing admiration. The Comanche woman was probably in her mid-thirties, for her face showed no wrinkles and gray had not invaded her black hair. She was a petite woman, not emaciated and not overweight. Content was the only word that Marty could conjure up to describe her. She was not extraordinarily pretty, nor was she ugly, Marty thought as she appraised Linda. But her endearing personality made her beautiful.

She had dark brown eyes, rosy, chubby cheeks that eclipsed a miniscule chin, all of which was surrounded by smooth cinnamon skin. Her nose was straight, flat and blunt at the end as if she had been whacked in the face with the wide side of a tomahawk. Her black hair, straight and scraggly, was bound at the nape of her neck with a narrow red leather strap that had been wound several times before it was tied in an unceremonious knot. She wore no jewelry; no adornments whatsoever except for a leather necklace that had been tucked beneath the blue cotton dress, which was faded and frayed. The leather leggings that peeked out from beneath her dress were stained but had held up well over the years and, although the suede moccasins were thinning around the toes and the soles were darkened from walking upon them, they seemed to be capable of many more years of wear.

Marty listened again while Linda continued, “At first, because I was too proud to ask anyone, he brought me food and clothing and blankets. But when a hard winter forced the other people from the village to move to the lower camping grounds, Linda Blue Sky stayed behind. When Buck visited me one day and saw me huddled in my tiny hut almost frozen to death, he offered me a job and a room in his home.”

“I am glad that he took you in,” Marty told her, exasperated by the woman’s plight.

“He’s a fine man,” Linda assured Marty, who already knew that to be a fact. “Greta is very lucky to have him for a husband. Linda Blue Sky and Rising Sun and Hunts-with-a-knife are lucky as well.”

Marty smiled at the woman and inwardly laughed at the way that she often referred to herself as if she was talking about someone else. Then she agreed with her companion, “Yes, he is a good man. And we are all lucky to have Buck in our lives.”

Recalling the vision that had come to her the day that Mrs. Tess had died, Linda seemed to be caught between the past and the present. It had been a sad day for Mr. Buck, she remembered. But, Linda Blue Sky knew that his sadness was not forever. She knew that Mrs. Greta would come to him. She had seen it the day that Mr. Buck’s wife had taken her final breath. But she could not tell the grieving man of her vision, for he would never believe it nor would he, at that awful time in his life, take it into consideration. His heart was broken and nothing Linda Blue Sky could say would change that. She simply had to let it happen as it would. And so she did. And alas, it did.

“Greta and I were very lucky that he found us and that he saved her,” Marty said with a nod and her words coincided with Linda’s thoughts, bringing her back into the conversation.

“Yes, you were,” Linda agreed with a bright smile. In her mind, too, she smiled, whispering ‘It was meant to happen’. But to Marty, she said, “Linda Blue Sky is happy that Mr. Buck will be a father.”

Then Marty remembered the fears that she had, for just an instant, harbored about the ‘Comanche woman curse’ and she apologized to Linda, who shook her head and told her, “There is no need. Many people believe it. Many don’t. I am not harmed by their beliefs or their words.”

Marty stared at Linda for a moment before she marveled, “You are a remarkable person.”

Linda lowered her head and blushed a bright red hue before she replied, “I am only Linda Blue Sky.”

Marty knew that she could not argue with the woman. There simply was no argument that she could summon at that moment. It was true what she had said. She was only Linda Blue Sky. And Linda Blue Sky was not a woman who held herself higher than any other person, nor did she have the slightest bit of animosity toward any person or any situation that befell her. She seemed to react to everything with a ‘Blue Sky’ mentality, as if nothing bothered her.